Trump eyeing a 10 percent middle-income tax cut plan

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House as he left on a campaign trip to Texas, said on Monday his administration planned to produce a resolution within two weeks calling for a 10 percent tax cut for middle-income people.

“We’re putting in a resolution sometime in the next week or week-and-a-half, two weeks,” Trump said. “We’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent. We’re doing it now for middle-income people.”

Trump said on Saturday his administration was studying a tax cut to be rolled out some time around the beginning of November just before the Nov. 6 congressional elections, even though lawmakers are out of town campaigning and Congress is not in session.

Trump’s fellow Republicans are seeking in the elections to hold on to their majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives.

The president clarified on Monday that the proposed tax cuts would be unveiled before the election but would have to go through Congress afterward.

“We won’t have time to do the vote” before the election, Trump told reporters. “We’ll do the vote after the election.”

The president, who was traveling to Texas to campaign for Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, said the latest tax cut plan was not meant to help businesses but was for middle-income earners and would be “on top of the tax decrease that we’ve already given them.”

Trump first raised the tax cut proposal in the same week the U.S. government ended the 2018 fiscal year with a $779 billion deficit, as previous Republican-led tax cuts squeezed revenues. The deficit figure was the highest in six years.

Last December, Trump signed into law the largest tax overhaul since the 1980s, which slashed the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent and temporarily reduced the tax burden for most individuals as well.

Reporting by Jeff Mason; Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Peter Cooney